State of the art in physician scheduling

We provide the first review that focuses on quantitative methods for physician scheduling in hospitals. We describe the relevant characteristics of various investigated physician scheduling problems, such as the problem type, i.e. Staffing, Rostering or Re-planning problems, personnel qualification and experience, and the utilized shift types. Furthermore, we analyze the existing literature with respect to additional modeling features including fairness aspects and underlying demand patterns, as well as employed solution approaches and real life applications. In total, we review 68 relevant publications in the OR/MS field. We use our presented framework to categorize the existing approaches and highlight gaps in the literature to initiate future research activities.